GAINESVILLE, Ga.—The founder of True the Vote, the conservative election integrity organization that organized challenges of thousands of questionable voter registrations after the 2020 election, testified that her group bent over backward to ensure what they did was legal and fair.
Catherine Engelbrecht, in more than three hours of direct testimony on Nov. 6 in a civil trial in federal court, described how she founded the nonprofit organization almost 15 years ago as a way to train electoral volunteers and engage more people in the system.
Ms. Engelbrecht and several others are defending themselves in a lawsuit filed by Fair Fight, an anti-voter-suppression group founded by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, on behalf of people who say their rights were violated when their registration was questioned.
The challenges were mounted between the Nov. 3, 2020, general election lost narrowly by then-President Donald Trump to current President Joe Biden, and the Jan. 5, 2021, runoffs in Georgia’s two Senate races to determine control of that narrowly divided house of Congress.
Fair Fight seeks to put True the Vote, Ms. Engelbrecht, and five co-defendants permanently out of the voter-challenge business in Georgia, which they describe in their lawsuit as the defendants’ “ongoing assault on the fundamental right to vote through their widespread and well-publicized attempts at voter suppression and intimidation.”
The trial, which began on Oct. 26, nearly three years after the lawsuit’s filing, has portrayed a disparate group of co-defendants who worked together loosely in the run-up to the Georgia runoff.
Ms. Engelbrecht’s group talked to numerous private lawyers and one in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division as well as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to make sure they were dotting i’s and crossing t’s in their creation of lists of voters who didn’t live where they voted.
She wanted, she said, “to make sure we were following the letter of the law.”
They worked with voting data buffs Derek Somerville and Mark Davis, who had been working on registration issues for more than 30 years. Ms. Engelbrecht didn’t meet Mr. Somerville until Dec. 15, 2020, when another co-defendant, Ron Johnson, put them in touch.
Another co-defendant, Mark Williams, is a local Atlanta metro area printer who often does political mailers, did printing work for True the Vote, and was experienced using U.S. Postal Service change of address databases that were the basis for the challenges.
Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Williams both testified on Nov. 6 that their cross-checking of work with each other and with Mr. Somerville and Mr. Davis assured them their work was accurate as their efforts, done independently, jibed with one another.
True the Vote, she said, was about “citizens rights and empowering citizens to serve.”
She testified she grew up in Rosenberg, Texas, a Houston suburb, and after college, started a precision manufacturing company with her husband. She hadn’t been involved in politics or government, she said, but her father had been on a city council for 20 years.
When she first served as an electoral volunteer around the 2008 elections, Ms. Engelbrecht said, “there was a group of us who went to work at the polls. There were not enough volunteers.”
She also witnessed problems, she said. Texas then didn’t require voter IDs and issued electoral cards to voters. Some showed up at the polls with more than one card. Others asked who to vote for.
After forming True the Vote, she found that many problems revolved around bad data in the voter rolls.
True the Vote trained citizen volunteers in elections-related activities like organizing voter registration drives and verifying signatures. The vast majority of the volunteers they trained, she said, were political independents who had never even voted in a primary election.
True the Vote became “a safe harbor drawing people who didn’t know how to get involved,” Ms. Engelbrecht said.
She also saw their 2020 election challenges, she said, as a way to restore the faith in the system in many people disillusioned after the disputed general election.
She regarded it as her group’s responsibility. “We had to do the best we could to be a pressure release by engaging people to serve, so they could be part of the process,” she said.
That election year was a whirlwind of pandemic-driven election changes that “threatened to undermine the procedural requirements around elections,” she said.
A single issue—the use of dropboxes to receive absentee ballots— raised numerous questions, from how to locate and monitor them to insecure chains of custody for the ballots.
Businesses from the post office to election offices were understaffed. Quarantines were in effect. The post office faced a sudden new surge of millions of absentee ballots. Governors or courts changed rules through emergency or consent decrees without consulting legislatures.
“It was just a lot,” she said.
True the Vote got involved earlier in the year, putting out fact sheets on all the new procedures so that citizens could learn how to vote and what the new policies were.
In her business, she said, much of their work was tied to using computers. A new company she started in 2014, CoverMe, which helped the uninsured or underinsured find health care insurance, was heavily data-driven.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers Uzoma Nkwonta and Christina Ford repeatedly objected to Ms. Engelbrecht and other defendants offering opinions on data, saying they weren’t experts. The defendants, for their part, have said the government generally is years behind most businesses in their use and manipulation of big data.
Ms. Engelbrecht said she didn’t like the word “challenge” used to describe what they did, as she deems it negative. She preferred it be called an “inquiry” or “update”.
“It’s just data,” she said.
Comparing change of address data with the state’s rolls of 7.7 million voters, True the Vote generated a list of 364,000 discrepancies. They winnowed that down to about 39,000 names where they and their allies argued there was probable cause to believe someone was voting illegally. Many people, including military service members, college students, and those temporarily relocated, can vote from their permanent residence.
Georgia law allows citizens to make voter challenges in counties where they live and vote, and True the Vote sought to find volunteers in each of Georgia’s 159 counties. They found volunteers in about 40 of them. It was up to the volunteers to contact their own Board of Elections and up to the Board of Elections to investigate each disputed voter registration to determine if probable cause existed.
She described herself as “passionate” on the subject of students voting. When she found that Texas A&M University didn’t have voting on campus, remedying that became one of her group’s early projects.
She found Texas’s Latino community deeply concerned about elections, she said. She traveled to Mexico City to see how elections were conducted there.
True the Vote wasn’t focused in any single area, she said. “Elections are important everywhere. It’s your voice, your identity. It’s important that you think your voice matters.”
An illegally cast vote, she said, negates the vote of a legal voter.
She came away from her meeting with Mr. Raffensperger and some of his deputies, she said, with the understanding that what they were doing was proper under the passage of state law allowing citizen challenges of voter registrations. Not only that, she said, she came away with the understanding that their work was welcomed, as National Voter Registration Act restrictions prevented the Secretary of State’s office from doing it except in its odd-year review of voter rolls.
She and other defendants repeatedly testified that they didn’t threaten, intimidate, or coerce any challenged voters, nor even have contact with them.
Mr. Davis, who testified earlier in the day via live video, with apparent sarcasm, congratulated Fair Fight that “I will no longer increase my constitutional right to seek redress” in the electoral system because of the legal expenses he’s incurred and the health problems he’s suffering.
One of the defense attorneys, Michael Wynne, told The Epoch Times, “Fair Fight are the ones who are intimidating voters.”
